On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 04:42:28PM -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote: > > That being said, I'm skeptical about the realism / helpfulness of > such meetings. Is it frequent that a writer gets to commit an item > and realizes someone else just wrote it? Not at all. It's true the contrary, sadly :) > I wasn't aware that the DPN was written at the last minute until > David noted it. Yeah, it's our Friday night party: generally me, David and Cédric trying to cook it before Saturday. We generally finish it at midnight (european time) or later. > What is causing this? Are we short on manpower so > everyone waits hoping that someone else will write before? Or are > writers just waiting as much as possible so they don't need to > update an entry about an ongoing event? I can't speak for David or Cédric (even if I think that at least David's case is similar to mine) but my "Debian" time is often quite full of things to do. Sometimes I can manage to write a couple of paragraphs of DPN during the week, but if I have also an announcement to do, it ends up that I have simply not enough time to dedicate to DPN. On the other hand (and note that this it is just a sensation, I could be wrong) there are a lot of people who would like to contribute but they simply don't know how to do it. Or they'd need a bit of tutoring/mentoring. I know this because when I started I had no idea how to write something in DPN (and for a not native speaker could sound really scary to write something from scratch in English): it was just hanging around in IRC, on the tail of Alexander and David that I learnt. There are a lot of tasks for newbie: for instance, take care of the "Upcoming events" section (collecting data from some specific sources I listed here [1]), adding interesting news to the TODO list for the current release (there's even a google alert for Debian related news, with reports available via this mailing list [2]), write the easier paragraph (did you notice? when we mention a Debian announcement or a Debian update on DPN we re-use the first paragraph of the announcement itself), etc. The purpose of the meeting is to help tutoring newbies and better distribute the work. And, btw, yes: I know for sure that there are people who want to contributes (did you remember the call for help of the publicity team some months ago? a *lot* of people replied). So, I'd really like to try something new, and regular meetings are one of the options. :) I've also set up a first draft of todo list - still really general and I'm not fully convinced of it, but I'm exploring possibilities - on gobby.debian.org for the publicity team (under the Teams/Publicity dir). If you prefer we can use gobby instead of IRC. Cheers, Francesca -- "Nostra patria è il mondo intero e nostra legge è la libertà ed un pensiero ribelle in cor ci sta." P.Gori
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